Throughout this time, his frailty was clear, especially to the ministers of the Thusser.2 The Emperor Nimrod would not act against them, and indeed he turned to them for ancient Thusser cures to his many infirmities. They inserted metal signs and devices beneath his skin; friends who pressed their ears to him could hear the mechanisms whispering and chewing. Though he only grew sicker after the treatment of the Thusser shamans, still he insisted that only they could help him enjoy another full century of riot and feasting, and he would not suffer the unholy appliances to be removed from him. After five months of these treatments, his body was a patchwork of stitches.
The Emperor Nimrod had by this date produced no stable heir to the throne. None of those he had fathered were suitable to rule. Several were, at birth, merely a gray powder; others were born tiny, and rapidly dwindled until they disappeared in the palms of their weeping nurses. A final one was born a motionless coil, who was kept for some weeks as the last hope of the Norumbegan dynasty, but who was eventually misplaced during the festivities following the summer’s rites and never seen again.
One night in August in the twelve hundred and twenty-fourth Imperial Year, shortly after the floods, when the air was still wet at all hours and mold thick in the eaves, the Emperor awoke in his bed to find that his door, though locked, was open. He recognized the figure of his mechanical valet entering, but heard an unaccountable noise, a continual humming. He asked his valet why he had been wakened, but the servant did not answer. The servant sat in a chair near the bed and placed his elbows on his knees and regarded His Serene Highness. The Emperor demanded an explanation in the loudest tone, but still the valet remained unmoving, buzzing, seated in the Emperor’s presence.
As the Emperor’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he saw eventually that his mechanical valet was covered in bees. They swarmed all over the body, the hands, the face, into and out of the mouth, constantly humming; and the Emperor realized that this was not his valet, but Death Himself.
The valet said to him, in an alien voice, “I am come for you, Emperor. This you take, sir, my hand.” He held out his hand. The bees began to crawl across the bedsheets toward our liege.
The Emperor began to scream—which roused many, who came running. Whether it was a dream, a vision, or a conspiracy, none know to this day; when servants and kinswomen arrived, the valet was stooped by the bed, trying to rouse the Emperor from a faint, and there was no swarm of bees.
When the Emperor awoke, he told the court what he had seen. He was terrified, believing that Death was chasing him. He demanded to be taken to his gyroscopic, egg-shaped throne. Throughout the night, he was hurled from rooftop to rooftop by his gymnasts, pleading that they never cease. They endeavored to throw him constantly in circles, traversing several miles over the domes and spires of the city.
It was to no avail. When two of the acrobats, exhausted, eventually dropped the Ovoid Throne, it fell five stories and broke open. It was discovered that in the course of the revolutions, the Emperor’s stitches had come unraveled. Unstitched, undone, he was in pieces.
They gathered him up and placed him in the royal hearse for the slow procession back to the palace. He was buried in state the next day, August 27, 1224 A.E.
So ended the Emperor Nimrod’s attempt to cheat the Lord of Death.
There was great fear in the Court, since there was still no heir; it seemed as if a period of mayhem and assassination might well follow.
Perhaps the author of the present volume may be thanked, therefore, for not dropping the Emperor’s sister down a well, as the Emperor Nimrod had requested of me seventy years previously. I had instead hidden her among the serving staff at a remote diner in the mountains. She knew nothing of her past. She had spent the last seven decades making pancakes and beefsteak platters, having finally married a Duke of the Blarnwyth Sidhe, who was disguised as a shortorder cook to avoid the poisoned bite and talons of his deranged grandmother. Together, they had produced a son—an infant, still—and it was he, Randall Elismoore, last heir to the House of Fendritch, who became the final Emperor of Norumbega.
ON AN UNHAPPY OMEN.
At the beginning of every reign, scenes of disaster are carved in drathl tusk, with the idea that thus calamities might be avoided: By stating disaster openly, you shame Fate into more friendly (or devious) ways. So have the Norumbegans ruled in prosperity and peace for centuries. We carve into the tusks of Royal Beasts these scenes of destruction, the toppling of turrets and explosions beneath the mountain, and thus avoid those very eventualities.3
When the infant Emperor Randall was crowned, a live drathl was sought in the caverns to the west of the Groping Commots, but it appeared that over the decades, Nimrod the Squat’s party guests had hunted them to extinction. After much searching, the old skeleton of a final drathl, riddled with age, was uncovered in a grotto near Queldge. The tusks were removed and the carvers went about their work, fashioning the traditional scenes of disasters we wished to avoid—fire, rebellion, war, disease, and geological ire.
The tusks, however, were rotten. No sooner had the master-carvers begun to inscribe their disastrous designs than the ivory crumbled. It would not hold the forms of houses or girls or waves. The master-carvers renewed their work, and the tusks shattered completely. Fate would make us no promises.
Nothing more was said of this. The shards of tusk were buried. The master-carvers were given lucrative positions at remote fungus farms in distant caverns.
The Emperor was a babe. Though the responsibility was onerous and the duties unpleasant, your present historian agreed unwillingly to act as Regent for the boy until he came of age. I ruled as best I could.
I hope I shall not be found boastful if I recall that decades of peace and prosperity followed, in spite of ill omens.
[From much later in the Lives:]
REGARDING THE EMPEROR RANDALL’S ROMANCE.
Being of quick wit and great beauty, the Lady Elspeth found it easy to seduce the Emperor Randall. This in spite of the wise counsel of one of his best and most trusted advisors, the present author, who sought to remind him of his duty in every way. Misled by this young woman—a girl of a mere forty or fifty years—Emperor Randall spent his time in idle pursuits. Rather than apply himself to policy, he spent his days engaged in games of squash, fives, lacrosse, water polo, and real tennis. Rather than practice his swordsmanship, he joined a semiprofessional hurling team. When the Thusser delegation arrived at the gates of Norumbega at the close of the Thirteen Minute War, rather than go to meet them, the Emperor Randall and Lady Elspeth retired to a still-life class where they spent some hours drawing an arrangement of trumpets and bulrushes.
It was only with difficulty that the present author managed to pull the Emperor away from his romance long enough to get him to negotiate with his adversaries. I fear that the Emperor’s distraction gave the Thusser Hordes the upper hand. By the time the Treaty of the Thirteen Minute War was signed, we had lost the forests in the region of Braythwhite, an important corridor of trade and travel, as was to become clear some years later during the Third War of Thusserian Aggression. I will speak elsewhere of this treaty; for the moment, I should mention that an attempt was made upon the Lady Elspeth’s life that night as she stood alone upon a balcony. It of course would have been generally lamented if she had died in such an untimely fashion. Fortunately, she fought off the masked attacker and called for help.
The next day, the Emperor felt remorse for having left the Lady Elspeth alone, and organized a surprise gala for her. I was unfortunately unable to attend, suffering as I was from mysterious bruises on my legs, arms, and face which had appeared overnight, perhaps as the result of an allergy to legumes.
It was at this gala that a startling omen appeared.
The Emperor assembled a small pleasure fleet, and the Court took to the water. Sir Telkwalm composed an Aqueous Symphony to be performed by the orchestra, which was followed by dances upon the Imperial barges.
During one o
f these dances, the assembled felt an unpleasant fluctuation and discovered that two human cublings had infiltrated the festivities. The humans, with no sign of awe or terror, clambered up on the Emperor’s barge and demanded the Imperial crown, claiming that it was needed in a future time to repel the advances of the Thusser Hordes.
The Imperial house had had little business with humans for some centuries, finding, on the whole, that the whelps were generally made nervous by the uneven flow of time among the Norumbegans. Early negotiations with the humans, as I have recorded in the history of Durnwyth Gwarnmore, had foundered when the humans discovered, upon returning to the Royal Court of Norumbega after a few weeks’ absence, that many years had passed here beneath the mountain, or that, on the contrary, friends they had previously made were not yet born.
These human children did not seem uncomfortable with the slip of time. In fact, they stole the Imperial Crown of Norumbega and disappeared.
The Emperor found the whole episode comical, though both Lady Elspeth, to her credit, and her brother, Archbishop Darlmore, attempted to convince him that the threat was serious.
For my part, I began to despair. If the future fate of Norumbega was to be in the hands of humans—of human children, no less—then we were without hope. My disposition was not helped when Lady Elspeth pointed out that omens may be delivered even by the least of animals—in the circling of gulls, the snorting of bulls, or letters formed by bread mold.
Thus, I began to consider a new policy: complete capitulation to the Thusser Hordes. I would no longer resist them, but would hope that by forming some alliance with them, I could fend off the attack that would otherwise destroy us entirely….
[Later in the book, some months after the Thusser Hordes declared war in a blatant attempt to seize Norumbegan territory…]
REGARDING THE END OF THE THIRD WAR OF THUSSERIAN AGGRESSION.
Bulsom, Greyfalk, and the Deeps of Fenneran had been bombed so heavily that little remained of them. Hundreds lay dead on the slopes of the mountain. Pummeled by blasts from pleasure-mortars, the people of Wyddlich were dreaming of summer days and festively pulling off their own skin. We had lost contact with Braythwhite, having no route to get there except through Thusser territory. Our only intelligence of that area came from a psychic twin, who told us that his identical brother had aged several years in four hours, and that the whole of Braythwhite was already razed and covered in Thusser subdivisions and culs-de-sac.
Nevertheless, all was not lost. The Thusser knew from their ancient verse histories that we were about to send warriors back to the time of their founding to harry their First Parents. They also knew—for we had told them—that we had already sent infection-assassins forward, to a point centuries after the Thusser triumph, and that these assassins would walk among their population, spreading a plague, dropping pellets in the reservoirs, breathing contagion in the city streets. The assassins would thus over their five months’ stay devastate the grandchildren of those Thusser who now fought the war, leaving most of them dead—and would return in time to have lunch with themselves before they left, drawing diagrams of the obstacles that would have to be overcome.
The Thusser knew as well as we did that if they allowed themselves to win, this reality, this future, would come to pass—they would be the victors, and several hundred years later, millions of their descendants would die in pestilential convulsions, their civilization crippled; whereas if they did not produce the victory we described, then the future we had made could not come to pass. On the one hand, it was clear that the Thusser Hordes could soon sweep over us and win the war; on the other hand, if they did, they doomed their nation. So we were, in other words, at a stalemate.
At this point, I received word by sparrow from His Excellency, the Magister of the Thusser Hordes, that he would be open to negotiations. Also, he promised me great riches if I would again betray my countrymen in the course of the discussions, as I had done in the early days of the war. He did not understand that I had only betrayed our cause in order to save us; or that, since having discovered my duplicity, the Emperor, Empress Elspeth, and the Archbishop Darlmore no longer trusted me.
I was, nonetheless, present at the negotiations. Chained to the floor, yes, mostly naked, and given a banana to eat, but still present. The discussions were held in the Rede-Hall of Pellerin, a circular hall used for meetings with otherworldly ambassadors in the time of the Empress Qui I. I recall too well the white stone of that place, the distant vaulting far above us, the muttering, robed Thusser in the seats around the perimeter of the hall, the shafts of glaring light that fell upon me where I sat chained in my nest of newspaper.
Emperor Randall was already seated at the table in the middle of the Rede – Hall. With a fanfare of klaxonettes, the Magister of the Thusser Hordes entered and approached the table, flanked by generals. It was much argued which ruler had the upper hand: he who sat already, or he who only deigned to enter once the other was seated.
The two monarchs, finally facing each other across the table of negotiation, displayed their tongues for inspection. Ministers came to their sides and the tongues were measured for their weight, dimensions, and truth. These formalities being over, the monarchs greeted each other and began to negotiate this, their final treaty.
ON THE TREATY OF PELLERIN.
[Much of this section has been omitted by the translator. It is basically nonsensical to the human reader, consisting of disputes over places that are often only an inch or two in width, or which no longer existed at all at the time of the negotiation, one side or the other laying exclusive claim simply to the memory of them or nostalgia respecting their passing. There are arguments about rights of time travel, who is allowed to change history at what point, and also long paragraphs made up of sentences like, “The bird cannot rest upon the pier unless my fist is raised. The bird has already rested upon the mountain. Do you understand—for the issue is flighty?” all of them in the elaborate sixth-person disembodied formal that marks Norumbegan court language at its most polite. We re-enter the discussion as the monarchs hit upon a new idea.—M. T. A.]
It seemed as if no agreement would ever be reached.
The Magister said, “I will not go forward with this.”
The Emperor said, “I will not go back.”
The Magister said, “I will not stand still.”
The Emperor said, “I will not move.”
“You will not budge?”
“I will not be shoved.”
“You know you have lost.”
“I know you haven’t won.”
“Perhaps,” said the Magister of the Thusser Hordes bitterly, “you would prefer it if we let our Youth and Maiden Intramural Volleyball Tourney decide the matter.”
At this, the Emperor’s eyes caught fire with delight. He exclaimed, “Ah! Are you a gaming man?”
“You may bet upon it,” said the Magister.
And so they hit upon the idea that they would play a game, and that the winner would take the whole of the territory of Norumbega.
Games were proposed and cast aside. The Emperor Randall wanted to flip a coin—he was giddy, devoured with pleasure at the thought that his entire Empire, built up through generations of labor and ritual, might be lost in one tiny, senseless act. It was clear that the idea thrilled him.
The Magister, however, did not trust the flipping of coins, arguing that there was too much room for intervention through magical breezes, minute shifts in gravity, and magnetic shoes.
At this, I shuffled forward. “Sir,” said I, “your humble servant has a suggestion.” I came to the end of my chain and bowed deeply.
It was then that I suggested that since two humans had prophesied the coming of this conflict, the stalemate should be resolved with human aid. I suggested that a game be played by humans—humans ignorant, as they always were, of their role in our history, and our role in theirs.
The Magister objected, “Our ambassadors saw the humans take your crown to sav
e you. This suggests that you will win.”
“Not,” said I, “if you pit human against human. Then we do not know, between the two boys who appeared to us, who might win.”
Though I was not in favor with either monarch, this idea appealed to them. They began to discuss details. The Emperor Randall wished the game to start as soon as possible; the Magister wanted it to go on for as long as possible, since, as he said, the Thusser couldn’t win the game until they had waited safely past the date when their grandchildren would otherwise be poisoned by time-traveling Norumbegan plague-assassins. Other details were resolved, such as who would oversee the game and how resources would be allotted for it.
I no longer listened. I was consumed with a despairing joy that the fate of our Empire would be decided by something as fickle and stupid as a human, the child of an ape. No matter how grand our architecture, how refined our wizardry, how exquisite our arts and our music, it would all be blasted into nothing by the stumbling and incompetence of a human child, a little cub with no sense of the stakes.
From this point on, I thought, you may disregard my counsel, and you may lock me up like your pet, but I have destroyed us all.
This thought gave me great pleasure. I sat in my bed of newspaper and counted, contentedly, my toes.
UPON THE EVACUATION OF NORUMBEGA.
It was agreed that since Norumbega was the prize of the Game, it should not be in the possession of either contestant until the Game was decided. The Norumbegans were well aware that they narrowly escaped complete destruction through this agreement—but still, when their Emperor returned to them, announcing the Treaty of Pellerin and that they all had to evacuate, many in the capital were furious and bellowed their slogans at the palace or tried to organize revolutionary movements to have the Emperor removed. The Weeping Matriarchs of Norumbega walked through the streets, tearing their clothing and wailing. A dangerous citizen named Seymire the Waltzer made his way into the Throne Room unnoticed and almost succeeded in shooting the Emperor, who might have died had he not been dressed in a lead apron for an alchemical demonstration.